


Into That Good Night

by lindsey_grissom



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-09
Updated: 2010-01-09
Packaged: 2017-10-10 14:43:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/100902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lindsey_grissom/pseuds/lindsey_grissom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It starts with a laser to the heart.  It never ends.</i>  Jack's reflections on living and dying, and living again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Into That Good Night

**One.**

The first time counts the most because it's the first of everything that follows.

The first time he dies and the first time he comes back alone. It's the first time he realises that his abandonment issues are about to get that much worse and the first time he realises that he probably won't be able to move on from them this time. It's not the first time he blames himself, but it's the first time since the first time that it's hurt this much.

He doesn't remember much about being exterminated. Just the pain. It's a pain, he thinks as he searches for anything that'll get him off this god, no _Doctor_ forsaken satellite, that no one should live to remember. It haunts him when he lets himself fall asleep nearly a week after he was left behind. He feels the pain of the alien laser hitting him but he dies slowly and when he looks up there's the Doctor with a banana for a gun and Rose is holding a plunger at her side.

He wakes up screaming, a non existent wound radiating pain and decides that he has to get back to them, just to prove that they're not to blame.

There's no one else there so when he talks out loud he prefers to do it in front of a shiny surface; at least then he can pretend it's a handsome stranger not himself that answers back. He waits, even though he tells the walls that he really isn't, but week three roles around and he figures that they're really not coming back. He works harder to get out and back to them instead.

When he leaves he makes sure the bodies are laid out and the dust is swept clear. He's seen the images of the Earth and knows he could help there. They need it. But he needs the Doctor and Rose so he presses the button on his newly fixed manipulator and waits for time to finish pulling him apart.

Two weeks later when he concedes that he will never fix the manipulator again with the limited tools available to him, he knows he should have chosen rebuilding Earth over hope.

*****

**Two to Two-Hundred and Thirty-Three.**

The second time he thrashes back to life with a hundred little screams and gasps of breath and it hurts like hell.

The second time is when everything changes.

Because everyone knows you can't cheat death. And okay, he's been lucky before, because he should have died on that body strewn beach, and there was that little thing with an axe and a husband he hadn't known about. Then there was the Chula ship and Satellite Five but they were just close calls. This is dying and coming back and no one can do that. Except Time Lords. He thinks for a moment that maybe it was more than two missing years, but he catches a glance of himself in a puddle and that's always been his face, mostly, so it's not regeneration. It hurts to breathe and that's sort of normal for him now, except this is real pain and he should have a wound to show for it. He hasn't.

And now he thinks that maybe he should have aged more than he has too. But he honestly didn't notice; beneath the grime and dirt he'd barely been able to remember his colour.

He decides it must have been another close call, because no one can come back from the dead and he's happy with that. Until he gets shot again four days later and his head cracks open against a wall a week after that.

It's the javelin that finally gets him to accept that something is wrong. It's more than painful and he feels like the pinned butterflies he's seen in museums on his travels with the Agency when he comes back with it still lodged in his back.

When he pulls himself free four deaths later he decides that before he thinks about it, he needs a drink. It takes hundreds of deaths, years he stopped counting sometime after the thirtieth death and two fierce lesbians with a thing for torture, to pull him back out of the bottle.

*****

**Seven-Hundred and Sixty-Eight to Seven-Hundred and Sixty-Nine.**

He gasps back to life and feels more bullets than he remembers pushing themselves out of his body. He hurts all over and the screaming sirens and circling lights only make his headache worse. He hates head shots and he'll be feeling this one for a few more hours. He wonders why it's always the head when they turn on him. Maybe it seems like a neater mutiny if he's dead right away.

The sirens keep blaring and he's partly conscious that some part of his brain has recovered enough to yell at his team and somewhere below him, his legs are working to support him.

He hates head shots because they leave him blurry and unfocussed. He's had enough that his body knows how to heal them fast and he comes back quicker every time. It just makes him a second target that much faster without the ability to think first and play dead a little longer.

Of course really he should be thinking about who shot him and why, but he knows that. It's always easier to think about the bigger things; the threats to the world and the giant life taking being the dangerous little man in the old fashioned suit made them bring through the rift. Easier to be the hero and the martyr and not consider that his team betrayed him and shot him in his own Hub when only one of them knew for sure he'd actually come back.

The not-thinking makes his head hurt more and when the chance comes to maybe, possibly end it all, he takes it.

It hurts more to die this time than waking up ever has and that's just different enough to give him hope that this might be the last time.

He wakes up on a morgue drawer with the sound of Gwen's heels on the concrete floor. He smiles when he sees the tears and guilt in her eyes. Maybe he isn't ready to end just yet.

*****

**{too} many to unknown.**

He dies choking the first time. He suffocates the second and third. It's a little of both the fifth through twentieth times. After that he's never alive enough to know what kills him. Until he is.

It doesn't hurt to live this way, which is some kind of relief. The nerves barely begin to send and receive their messages and he's already dead again. It doesn't hurt to die either, but he's felt that way before. But coming back without pain, that's something new.

It takes him two decades to realise there's a tree root working its way through his spine and three centuries to force it back out. His body regenerates over and over and he focusses on the root to make sure it remembers that the plant isn't part of him.

He smiles when he knows the last part of it is gone, like it's a victory against something. The smile stays there for a few more centuries. It's always been his default before and he can't seem to stay alive long enough to change it.

They dig him up eventually and he still doesn't feel anything. They try to ask him where he's from and how he got here, what's going to happen in the future and how the hell was he buried that far down. He tells them he's like a wandering minstrel; _rootless_ and laughs until they put him into cold storage.

*****

**Day One.**

He wakes up to a cold table and blurry outlines.

Someone's voice sounds like they expected it and that scares him more than a lot of things.

He still can't see the people around him, but he can see the bullet, all spinning grey, before it disappears between his eyes.

*****  
**Day Two.**

Ianto tells him that counting time in deaths is morbid and not a little terrifying. He tells Ianto that Earth days contradict the ones he grew up with, so if he has a better suggestion would he care to share it with the class? Somewhere between lips on his cock and sated kisses against his collarbone, Ianto tells him.

So when he comes back screaming and thrashing as his body tries to rebuild lost limbs and every layer of organ and tissue from the inside out, he calls this Day Two of the _Children_ case and he's pissed as hell because he hadn't really gotten over Day One yet. And it hurts, god does it hurt and he's known for some time that there were worse things than death, that one of them was living and living and living no matter what, but even the Master hadn't torn him apart to see if he grew back together. Hadn't used him to kill his lover and his friend.

It's the anger and the hatred that draw him back before he's fully healed and the agony just feeds it more. He screams and yells and no matter how much it hurts he shows them that he won't be beaten, not when plenty more have tried and failed. And they were better.

So he takes in the face of his captor, folds it up and hides it deep inside where the memory will stay and keep pulling him back. When the cement rises high enough to cut off his shouts he thinks that at least when he wakes up over and over he knows it won't hurt. He thinks of her face and he smiles.

*****

**Day Four.**

Nothing hurts like this one. He wakes up and doesn't care. He killed Steven and Ianto's gone. He survives, of course. _He survives_.


End file.
